Often, I get asked why helping gifted kids matters, especially when there are so many children who are struggling with basic literacy and numeracy. While part of the reason gifted education matters is that every child deserves to learn in school and that gifted children experience negative academic, social, and emotional outcomes when their needs are not met, another reason is that we all lose out when our top minds--those most able to solve the problems facing the country--aren't able to reach their full potential. The Boston Globe recently published an article about a longitudinal study showing that students identified as gifted at age 12 grew up to be leaders in their respective fields.
The article quotes psychologist David Lubinski:
"We are in a talent war, and we're living in a global economy now....These are the people who are going to figure out all the riddles. Schizophrenia, cancer--they're going to fight terrorism, they're going to create patents and the scientific innovations that drive our economy. But they are not given a lot of opportunities in school that are designed for typically developing kids."While it may seem like gifted kids will grow up to be successful adults no matter what, it turns out that educational opportunity matters:
"Two recent papers based on data from the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth and published in the Journal of Educational Psychology found that, among young people with off-the-charts ability, those who had been given special accommodations--even modest ones, like being allowed to skip a grade, enroll in special classes, or take college-level courses in high school--went on to publish more academic papers, earn more patents, and pursue higher-level careers than their equally smart peers who didn't have these opportunities. In one of the studies, the Vanderbilt researchers matched students who skipped a grade with a control group of similarly smart kids who didn't. The grade-skippers, it turned out, were 60 percent more likely to earn doctorates or patents and more than twice as likely to get a PhD in science, math, or engineering."If you want to help convince policymakers to invest in America's future, check out the National Association for Gifted Children's site on effective advocacy.
